Biased and unprofessional reports on German books, translation issues and life in Berlin

Monday, 5 October 2015

Jenny Erpenbeck: Gehen, ging, gegangen

We know what Jenny Erpenbeck does. I even met a woman who
was enthusiastically reading her The End of Days on a train to Poland. Jenny
Erpenbeck writes award-winning novels interweaving stories of lives in German
history. And she writes about women. Now, though, Erpenbeck has written a book
about men in the present day. Gehen, ging, gegangen is the story of Richard, a
professor of Classics just retired and casting about for something to fill his
time. He comes across a protest by refugees from various African states, who
have occupied a Berlin square to try to obtain the right to stay in the city.
As Tony Malone wrote in his recent review, Richard is initially motivated by
little more than boredom and curiosity to find out about the men, once they’ve
been moved into accommodation in his own suburb. But as the novel progresses, the
protagonist’s interest becomes less academic and more personal. (Seeing as Tony’s
review concentrates on Richard, I’m going to look at other aspects here.)

In between, however, Erpenbeck does build in her trusted
technique of patching stories together – the stories of the men Richard gets to
know, how they ended up in Berlin, where they came from, why they had to leave.
There’s a lot of geopolitics here, but also individual details. The professor
starts by interviewing one man at a time, approaching their lives laterally:
what songs did they sing as children, what dishes did they eat on religious
holidays, how long does it take to build a hut in the desert? But as they
become friends, the men’s life stories flow more naturally and we learn about
both the harrowing details and the good times.

The novel is based on real events, when a group of refugees
from across Germany marched to Berlin to campaign for more rights, occupying
Oranienplatz and a nearby school and eventually coming to an agreement with the
city council that saw them moved to slightly more comfortable housing, with the
promise that their cases would be reviewed. Which they were; only European law,
as we’re probably all now aware, flatly denies asylum to individuals in
countries other than those where they first set foot on EU soil. Meaning that
almost all the men, having been unable to fly to Germany because that’s
practically impossible in most cases, weren’t entitled to stay in the city
where they wanted to live with their friends. The city council refused to offer
the group of protesters any leeway and set about deporting them.

Erpenbeck takes that situation and reflects it back though
Richard’s appalled point of view. Because yes, it is appalling. Rather like
Chris Cleave in The Other Hand/Little Bee, she gives us a white middle-class European
to help us relate to her refugee characters. I think anything else, for
instance writing in the voices of the refugees, would be presumptuous.* And I
think it works very well. Richard’s initial view gave me occasional cause to
flinch; although he’s generally open-minded, he’s a man of his time and place –
a man who grew up in East Germany (again true to Erpenbeck’s form). He’s not
used to people of colour, and indeed the men’s skin colour is mentioned over
and over, at least to begin with, in a way Anglophone readers might find
disturbing. Yet as their relationships become closer, skin becomes less and
less important to him.

He researches the difficult legal situation from scratch so
that we readers can learn with him, accompanying friends to appointments with
lawyers, officials and doctors. He finds small ways to help the men but is
angry with himself for giving nothing but cheap charity. Eventually, though,
Richard does more than that, taking a political stance. I’d see the book itself
as a similar step further than charity. While it includes a call for donations
in the final pages, Gehen, ging, gegangen is much more important in that it
helps us to grasp a complex situation and feel something like understanding for
the way refugees are treated in Europe.

With classicist Richard as its main protagonist, the novel
also explores the idea that human nature and human emotional lives have changed
little over many centuries, another of Erpenbeck’s literary premises and something reflected in the title. One
critic objected to Richard’s comparisons of some refugees with mythological
figures, from Apollo to Tristan, saying it detracted from their individuality.
For me, though, this quirk underlined the book’s moral message. And yes, I
think it’s fine for a novel to have a moral message. What came across for me
was that flight, exile, escape from poverty, war and conflict, whatever you
wish to call it, has happened throughout history and that Europeans should not
presume it can’t happen to us again. As such, we are obliged to take in those
it’s happening to now.

Gehen, ging, gegangen is less of a smooth read than The End
of Days, for example, with less supportive structure. That does not make it
any less of a novel, however. Its topicality has rather crept up on it, which
some reviewers seem to find off-putting. I can’t imagine that was calculated –
instead, it comes across as though Erpenbeck was moved to write by the people she
met on Oranienplatz – whom she names in the back of the book – rather than by any
desire to make a buck. It will come out in Susan Bernofsky’s translation in
2017 – and I will be disappointed if it doesn’t win the German Book Prize on 12
October.

4 comments:

It's funny that it was only when I got to the editing stage of writing my review that I realised how much I'd focused on Richard, to the almost total exclusion of the refugees themselves. It's definitely a book about us, the people who are watching and could do something if they wanted...

Interestingly, one (German) blogger wasn't sold on Richard and would have preferred a female protagonist, something which (besides being impractical given that several of the men were Muslim and may not have let 'Richard' get so close) would have been a cop out. I'm glad she wrote him as a man, warts and all (even if his lusting over the temporary teacher seemed a little extraneous by the end of the book).